Film as an archive for colonial photographs: activating the past in the present

This practice-led research looks at the ways in which the colonial archive, and the colonial photographic archive in particular, can be reconstructed to produce new critical histories. The research argues for the potential of the moving image as a tool for re-staging colonial archives, as a means of generating responsible ways of looking at, and of engaging with our troubled collective pasts. In my practice I mix the photographic archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company(which became BP) with my family’s photographs from Iran, and with the documentation and narrativization of my encounter with both of these sets of materials, within the moving image. Through this process I address questions about the nature of the photographic archive and the search for historical meaning within it; the question of the researcher’s position within the archive and within the history she produces; and I investigate the affective power of colonial photographs within film and the experience of untimeliness which they produce. While addressing problems associated with the failure of photographic archives to offer access to any stable, transparent meaning, I show how engaging with slippages of meaning can produce other kinds of historical knowledge. But I also argue that attending to the impression of the ‘real’ produced by the colonial photograph as it appears within film, makes the past felt in the present tense, in ways that draw attention to the responsibility of being an onlooker in a situation of injustice. In addition I show how registering the place and time of the researcher within the new filmic archive in motion produces an effective means of imaginative time travel and a lively experience of history.

The Punk-Rock King: Musical Anachronism in Period Film

Music has a powerful indexical ability to evoke particular times and places. Such an ability has been exploited at length by the often-elaborate soundscapes of period films, which regularly utilise incidental scores and featured period songs to help root their narrative action in past times, and to immerse their audiences in the sensibilities of a different age. However, this article will begin to examine the ways in which period film soundtracks can also be used to complicate a narrative sense of time and place through the use of ‘musical anachronism’: music conspicuously ‘out of time’ with the temporality depicted on screen. Through the analysis of a sequence from the film W.E. (Madonna, 2011) and the consideration of existing critical and conceptual contexts, this article will explore how anachronistic soundtracks can function beyond ‘postmodern novelty’ or ‘nuisance’ to historical verisimilitude, instead offering alternative modes of engagement with story and history.

The metamorphosis of authority: a case study of the Aga Khan Development Network and the Ismaili Imamate

This research is a study of modern developments of the institutions of the Nizārī Ismaili imamate during the time of the present Ismaili Imam, Shāh Karīm al-Ḥusaynī, Aga Khan IV, as the 49th hereditary living Imam of Shiʿi Nizārī Ismaili Muslims, particularly addressing the formation of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) and the functions of the Community institutions. Using the case study of the Aga Khan Development Network and the Nizārī Ismaili imamate, this research demonstrates that the three ideal types of authority as proposed by Weber, namely the traditional, charismatic and legal-bureaucratic types, are not sufficient to explain the dynamics of authority among Muslims. This is partly due to Weber’s belief in the uniqueness of Western civilisation, which is a product of his thesis on Protestant Ethics and partly because his ideal typical system does not work in the case of the Muslim societies. The Ismaili imamate with its multifarious institutions in contemporary times is the most suitable counter-example by which to powerfully demonstrate that Weberian models of authority fail to explain this phenomenon and it would indeed appear as a paradoxical institution if viewed with Weberian theses. The Ismaili imamate in contemporary times represents a paradigm shift and a transmutation not only as regards the Weberian models but also when viewed from inside the tradition of Shiʿi Muslim history. This evolutionary leap forward, which has been crystallised over the course of the past half a century, in the Ismaili imamate suggests the development of a new form of authority which is unprecedented. There are clearly various elements in this form of authority which could be discerned as rooted in tradition and history; however the distinctive elements of this new form of authority give it a defining and exciting dimension. There are several qualities which are peculiar to the contemporary condition of the Ismaili imamate and its style of leadership which are distinctive. Most importantly, while some central features, like succession by way of designation (naṣṣ) has not changed, there is one overarching quality which can best capture all these elements and that is the transmutation of the Ismaili imamate from the person of the Imam into the office of imamate and thus we are now facing the institutionalisation of the imamate and the office being the embodiment of the authority of the Imam. I have described this new development as a metamorphosis of the authority because it gives an entirely new form and content to the previously familiar concept of authority in the Shiʿi Ismaili Muslim tradition.